On The Question of Salvatore
by Kanokirri
Summary: My follow-up to Salvatore On Trial. Much more to the point and more details that I didn't put in the first one.


A/N: This is my companion piece to Salvatore On Trial, the latter didn't quite go where I wanted it to. This time I assure you that my lovely cat is nowhere near anything to stop my writing. Some reviews actually scolded me for stopping with the name changes mistakenly believing that they were all I had but that is not the case. Thus, this story. I would like to thank everyone who reviewed Salvatore On Trial and those who I actually was able to correspond with for helping me developed a more solid idea of what I'm doing this time. This is for you!

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters/real people you recognize as not belonging to me. Likewise any of the things I choose to point out in this piece are not mine and are the work and property of R.A. Salvatore, I'm just pointing some things out ant attempting to make fun of those mistakes. Any characters you recognize as mine are mine as is the fictional set up that I'm using.

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On The Question of Salvatore

Kitana sat at her desk in her dimly lit room shuffling through a large stack of papers. She had taken the time to collect information for her hopefully continuing trial of the author R.A. Salvatore. The first half had been fairly short and was not what she would have liked it to have been, but it was behind her now. She had other things to do and more things to point out and she was not going to base her entire "lawyer" career on ranting about name changes. She paused to look up from her gathered work when she thought she heard a small noise from somewhere in her room, she sighed when she saw nothing and returned her attention back to her work.

It could not have been more than two minutes later when a sharp tap on her shoulder caused her to jump and look up again. Kitana almost swung a fist at the person who dared disturb her but saw in time that it was her friend Hitori standing there. She put her hand down and asked him what he wanted.

"I just came in to check on you." He said "You've been in here for a while. What are you doing?"

"Preparing for the next part of my trial." Kitana replied. "I want this part to be better."

"What about your cat? I haven't seen him all day."

Kitana tapped a finger against her lip. "Ah yes, Monkey the Merciless Shredder of Shower Curtains and Breaker of Brooms is sleeping elsewhere. He wont be joining me in the next trial." The two friends shared a laugh at the ridiculous titles and sat down together in the armchairs by the fireplace.

"So how much do you have done?" Hitori asked.

Kitana shrugged. "Enough hopefully. I wont have anything about the name changes again this time I made that point at least. I was mainly going to focus on changes in the plot and character development. You wouldn't believe some of the things Salvatore's screwed up on."

"Are you sure it's not his editor?"

"That's the funny thing." Kitana said as she put her chin into her palm and leaned into the arm of the chair. "I scryed his editor's office today. Nothing but a dark room full of spiderwebs."

The half drow snorted into the cup of tea he had brought with him. "Are you serious?"

The young woman didn't bother to look up and started twisting a strand f her hair. "Yeah," she replied lazily. "So either it's a very dirty person or the editor in question is non-existent. I wouldn't be surprised either way, not with all the typos. I mean, I know I'm one to talk, but you would think that if there were an editor there wouldn't be so many and on top of that maybe there wouldn't be so many inconsistencies. Then again, maybe there is and they don't make enough to pay housekeeping."

Hitori managed not to spew his tea everywhere this time and instead set his cup down before continuing. "What changes are you talking about exactly? I've never read Salvatore, so I'm at a bit of a loss."

Kitana thought a moment on where to begin then settled on one of the things one of the jury members had mentioned after the first part of the trial. Alright, you know he has a panther companion named Guenhwyvar right? One of the things he took a long time on deciding is it a male or a female. I read The Dark Elf Trilogy first and there was no given gender in the first or second book. In the third one there were brief references of Guen being male until Catti-brie made her first appearance and said that Guenhwyvar was a girl. Something to the effect of "She's a beautiful cat." I don't remember off the top of my head."

"What about the books before and after those then?" Hitori asked.

"In the Icewind Dale Trilogy Guenhwyvar was mostly referred to as a female except for maybe once or twice. My point on that though is that Salvatore seemed slow to make up his mind on the matter. The last set I read Guenhwyvar was female and I don't think that's going to change with the next book. But another thing that I was going to point out in the first part of the trial was that Salvatore also changed the story on how Drizzt and Guenhwyvar met. The book The Crystal Shard came before the one Homeland and they both talk about it but they're two completely different stories even though they talk about the same things. Homeland said that Drizzt first met her after Alton DeVir tried to kill him while he was at Sorcere. Masoj Hunnet used Guen to cover up the assassination attempt. After that they were allowed to play around at times and after Drizzt got out of the academy they were in the same patrol group. Drizzt's brother Dinin made it so both Drizzt and Guenhwyvar were at the point of the patrol unit. Then later on in the book after the surface raid there's this battle with svirfnebli in the tunnels outside Menzobarranzan, Drizzt killed an earth elemental but most of the gnomes escaped so Masoj sent Guenhwyvar after them like a hound. Drizzt hated that but couldn't do anything about it because Dinin told one of the other drow to cut off Belwar's hands. Then towards the end of the book Masoj sends Guen to kill Drizzt but Drizzt breaks Masoj's hold over her after she rescues him from a cave fisher and the two have been friends ever since. Drizzt went back to Masoj and ended up killing him and Alton and he took the figurine and ran away to House Do'Urden."

"Ok so what about The Crystal Shard?"

"Almost the same except there was no mention of the surface raid and mainly it read like Masoj introduced them and they were allowed to hang out once or twice but met in secret. It said that Masoj got the figurine from some demon about something concerning gnomes. Drizzt got caught by the cave fisher and Guen rescued him and they knew from that day that they had to be together as friends. Sounds more like some sappy romance thing if you ask me, but anyway, after that the things with the svirfnebli happened and Drizzt didn't like how Masoj had used Guenhwyvar so he assassinated Masoj and took the figurine."

Hitori leaned forward in his chair. "Alright so obviously that isn't the only thing he screwed up. What else is there?"

"Well, he also likes to throw around how the characters change a lot. Like one book Drizzt will be the awesome superhero ranger that everyone loves and even though a lot of bad things have happened to him he learns to live with it because he has his friends and that's all that matters. Then in other books he'll whiney and scared and depressed. Or he'll go and do the 'Well maybe if I give myself to the enemy they'll leave my friends alone' thing. Or with Entreri to, he started out as this total bad ass assassin without any care for anyone else, he was ruthless and cold. The only time he saw it fit to actually help someone out is if they were on the same team trying to get the same people. Like in Streams of Silver, Catti-brie escaped by convincing the Luskan soldier Jeirdan to go after Entreri and then she knocked the wizard Sydney out and ran away. Entreri killed the soldier but stuck around to take care of Sydney because they were still partners at that point even though he thought that the golem was dead. He's pretty much the same way in The Halfling's Gem only he didn't really have a partner in there and he killed off the wererat guy who wanted to be so he could make himself stronger. Then in The Legacy he turns up partnered with Jarlaxle and so the dynamic duo was formed. He's still just as obsessed with killing Drizzt in this one as the last one but then in Starless Night and after he gets all depressed because he suddenly sees that his entire life has been a lie after staying in Menzobarranzan. That carries on into The Silent Blade until Jarlaxle makes him believe that he killed Drizzt. Then at the end of that one he went and killed the halfling Dondon because he was overly fat and wasting himself away but makes good friends with Dwahvel."

"But anyone would be mostly out of their mind after getting stuck in Menzobarranzan, wouldn't they?" Hitori asked. "Maybe I'm missing some of your point, but it's my understanding that Entreri was depressed after because he saw himself in every drow in the city and realized that he had wasted his entire life trying to be the best but by doing so he never got there."

Kitana nodded her ascent. "That's all true. But all of that brought on a lot of out of character speculation in him. He was questioning everything about himself and everything around him and didn't know what to do with himself. I suppose that would happen to anyone but then he decides that he wants someone to be his friend and suddenly he's more open to a few things, he actually developed in a good way as a character for a while even going so far as to rescue Jarlaxle from Crenshinibon and running off with him to be bounty hunters. The problem comes up when he meets Calihye, Salvatore used Idalia's flute as an excuse. Because of the flute he begins to want someone to love and this goes on alongside his normal portrayal. He accidentally killed Calihye's friend on the road by not holding onto her and letting her fall under a wagon but when Calihye swears her revenge on him he has the perfect opportunity to kill her but doesn't for some reason. By the end of Promise of the Witchking he is still insisting that he didn't kill her friend and then they end up on the barroom floor having at it all night and he falls in love with her and all that stuff. Then in Road of the Patriarch they're in bed ad she tries to kill him, he's all betrayed, throws her out a window to kill her but then goes looking for her. After that a bunch of stuff happens because of Jarlaxle and they get banned from the Bloodstone lands and Entreri wants to go to Memnon so they do along with the dwarf Athrogate. He starts remembering all this stuff from his past and wants to find his mother finds out she's dead and died a long time ago shortly after she gave him up. He went on a rampage against the priests in the Temple of Selune and then he's just blank. He isn't really anything anymore and Salvatore just leaves him like that! It's bad enough he rushed the story but he just left Entreri like that!"

"Perhaps he thinks that there's nothing else he can do with Entreri as a character."

"No! That's not true there is so much more he can do he's just being lazy and wants to go on with Drizzt this and Drizzt that. Entreri was a way better character because he was realistic. I'm not saying that Drizzt isn't but he's just either too goody or too whiney. At least Entreri didn't cry about everything. But we don't hear about him except for a small mention in the Transitions books. Either in The Orc King with Drizzt doing some reminiscing or in The Pirate King because of a small scene with Jarlaxle. And speaking of those two books, not only do they not mention Entreri properly they went in completely opposite directions. The Orc King started out a hundred years in the future for some odd reason and ended in the future but most of the book was set immediately after The Hunter's Blades books. I thought when I got The Pirate King it would go on like that and start in the future again maybe shed a little more light on it but it read an awful lot like the Luskan level in the game Neverwinter Nights. It turned out to just be this one guy's plot to take over Luskan with Jarlaxle somehow involved. Then Captain Deudermont also went completely backwards. He was a good captain hunting pirates on the Sword Coast for good and all that but then he became some over-foolish hero type that wasn't him at all. And then he got killed for being so stupid. Oh, and in that series Catti-brie is suddenly a mage! In The Two Swords she got hit with an orc or goblin spear and couldn't run so Alustriel took pity on her and started teaching her magic. And then Catti-brie and Drizzt are together after the entire Legend of Drizzt of being 'should we do this, I don't think it's a good idea'. I don't like them as a couple she jumped around them too much."

The half drow raised an eyebrow and stopped her rant for a moment. "Jumped around who?"

"Drizzt and Wulfgar. At first, she had a bit of a schoolgirl crush on Drizzt. Perfectly understandable for a teenage girl she was sixteen in the Icewind Dale Trilogy. Then Wulfgar shows up and she decides she likes him. They get close and are like that until Wulfgar 'dies' in The Legacy then she starts getting all close to Drizzt and they debate on a relationship until the end of Passage To The Dawn where Wulfgar is miraculously brought back from the dead because he was really Errtu's prisoner. And then she goes back to him but still with slight feelings for Drizzt and at this point she's almost thirty. But Wulfgar is all messed up because of being a balor's prisoner for six years and he needs some time to regain himself so he goes off on his own and then she's back to Drizzt they end up kissing in The Sea of Swords they meet back up with Wulfgar in that one and it looks like she's got her mind set on Drizzt this time but through the remainder of the Legend of Drizzt she's still eyeing Wulfgar on and off. That really pisses me off." Kitana stopped abruptly to think if she missed anything. Hitori watched in amusement as her head tilted to the side and her brow furrowed in contemplation.

"Did you forget something?" he asked almost teasingly.

"Um, well, a lot of the time the character's of House Do' Urden don't really add up. Homeland tells us that Malice is five hundred had Briza when she was one hundred so that makes her four hundred. No father mentioned there either. Rizzen, Dinin, Nalfain, Maya and Vierna aren't given ages but there was a small mention of Vierna being 'centuries' old. That was when Zaknafain was thinking about when he was fighting with Malice over her like he was fighting with her for Drizzt. But what really got me was that the book says specifically that females started Arach-tinillith at forty and spent the next fifty years there. Briza was mentioned at just having been made a high priestess at four hundred. Does it really take that long to be a priestess for so long and then become a high priestess? And then Vierna couldn't have been more than half that realistically because Nalfain was born after Briza and he had to have been maybe three hundred at least. I have no idea really because he didn't get an age. But Nalfain's father was Rizzen and he was mentioned as being younger than Briza in Homeland, he was Dinin's and Maya's father too so they would have to be anywhere from three hundred fifty to at least a hundred. I really don't know more off the top of my head Hitori. Do you think that's enough? I just reread every book I have that Salvatore wrote this week."

"Haven't you read them all more than once already?"

"Yes but that's besides the point. When I had the first part of the trial I hadn't reread them in a while, which is probably why it didn't go over so well. At least not to me."

"I think you did a good enough job, your whole thing is got get this stuff out there right?"

"You're not helping. I guess I'll have to wait for my jury to decide for real this time."

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The next week Kitana brought all of everything she told Hitori to trial. This time with no cat in sight it went smoothly and she felt pretty good about everything she had brought up. With any luck her jury would agree with her belief that he was indeed guilty of all of the above and find some humorous idea what to do with Salvatore even though it could never be acted out.


End file.
